Transactions of the Royal Historical Society· 2026Q1
Estuary and Ecofantasy: The Everyday Lives of Nipa Palm between Builder and Botanist
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- 2026year
Short summary
In 1940, botanist David Fairchild photographed nipa palm being woven into roof shingles by Filipino women, capturing the convergence of traditional Southeast Asian building labor and colonial botanical collection practices.
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Key points
- Botanist David Fairchild photographed nipa palm being woven into roof shingles in the Philippines in January 1940.
- The photographs capture the intersection of traditional, gendered building labor in Southeast Asia and colonial botanical collection for a garden in Miami.
- The study focuses on the agency of women laborers whose everyday work is often overlooked in architectural history.
- The process is presented as crucial to understanding contemporary body politics in the Global South and European views of tropical regions.
AI-generated from the title and abstract; the full text is not read.
Abstract
Abstract This text follows a well-known botanist along the shoreline of a Philippine island as he takes photographs of nipa palm ( nypa fruticans ), in its passage from plant to building part. It is January 1940 and David Fairchild is interested in plants for the collection of his new botanical garden in Miami, nicknamed ‘the kampong’. He takes a photograph of nipa being woven into roof shingles by women sitting cross-legged, watched by children. At the lens of Fairchild’s camera, the material forms of two world orders converge. One is the process of building construction in archipelagic Southeast Asia, a gendered process of manual fabrication where muscle-memory guides the way and instruction is by observation. The second is that of the camera, that tool of observation, tracking, and extracting of tropical environments. The article discusses the agency of these women in the context of the history of everyday labour forms that are systematically overlooked in architectural history, showing instead how the process is crucial to a contemporary body politics of the South and European perceptions of the tropics.
The authors' abstract, as published at the source. Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 2026 · DOI ↗
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Field: Museology
MuseologyArts and Humanities